Bélanger was first elected to Parliament on February 13, 1995, in a by-election in the riding of Ottawa—Vanier, which has a large Francophone population. His predecessor, Jean-Robert Gauthier, was appointed to the Senate. Ottawa–Vanier is considered a solid Liberal riding, having returned a Liberal MP since its creation in 1935, usually in a landslide. Bélanger himself won by large margins in the 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections. He won re-election for a seventh term by a reduced margin with 38.2% of the vote in the May 2011 election. In the October 2015 election, Bélanger had his largest margin since the 1997 election.
Bélanger was re-elected in the 2006 federal election, and served as the Official Opposition critic for Canadian Heritage from February 2006 to January 2007, when he began a nine-month stint as critic for Infrastructure and Communities under new Liberal leader Stéphane Dion. From October 2007 to March 2008, Bélanger served as the Official Opposition critic for Official Languages, Canadian Heritage, and the Francophonie. After Bélanger won his seat once more in the 2008 federal election, he was appointed as Official Opposition critic for Official Languages in March 2010 by Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. After Bélanger's re-election in the 2011 federal election, he continued as his party's critic on this file under interim leader Bob Rae until May 2012. After Justin Trudeau's election as Liberal leader, Bélanger was appointed the party's critic for Cooperatives in August 2013.
Return to government
Following his re-election in the 2015 federal election, Bélanger submitted his name for the position of Speaker of the House of Commons and was considered a front-runner for the post. However, on November 30, Bélanger announced that he was withdrawing as a candidate for speaker after he received a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Despite his diagnosis, Bélanger continued as MP for Ottawa—Vanier. In December 2015, fellow Ottawa-area Liberal MP Andrew Leslie presented a motion in the house to name Bélanger honorary Speaker of the House of Commons and the right to sit in the chair for a future day. In January 2016, Bélanger became the first MP to use a voice generator in the House of Commons when he used an app on his tablet to introduce a private member's bill to amend to lyrics of "O Canada" to make them gender-neutral, which he had failed to do through a similar bill in the last parliament by a 144–127 vote. On March 9, 2016, Bélanger sat in the Speaker's chair for one day, and presided over the proceedings with the aid of an iPad app that produced a computerized voice. This honour made Bélanger the first honorary speaker of the house for a day. On May 6, 2016, consideration of Bélanger's bill to make the national anthem gender neutral was blocked when Conservative MPs used up the hour of debate time and refused consent to two motions backed by both the Liberals and the NDP to extend debate and allow time to hold a vote to send the bill to committee. As Bélanger's health was deteriorating, Liberal MP Greg Fergus described the Conservative's procedural delay tactics as an attempt to prevent Bélanger from seeing the bill passed, while Conservative MPs insisted that they were debating an important issue and had followed parliamentary procedure. Fellow Liberal MP Linda Lapointe gave up her timeslot for private member's business on May 30 to allow Bélanger's bill to be heard and go to a vote for it to be sent to committee the following day. In June 2016, the bill passed its third reading with a vote of 225 to 74 in the House of Commons. In July 2017, the bill was in its third, and final, reading in the Senate; the bill was passed on January 31, 2018 and received royal assent on February 7, 2018 to change "in all thy sons command" to "in all of us command", after Bélanger had already died.
Positions
Bélanger earned recognition for his promotion of francophone rights. In 2012, Bélanger asked the House of Commons to create a committee to examine the role of co-ops in the Canadian economy. This motion was unanimously passed by the House of Commons. He presided over the Canadian House of Commons for one day as an honorary Speaker on March 9, 2016, a job he aspired to before his diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Later that year, Bélanger became the National Honorary Spokesperson for the ALS Societies' Across Canada WALK for ALS.
